Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
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SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
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Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Links 04/11/2026: Slop Helps Break Laws and Scam Altman Pretends Chatbots Are Persons
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXVII - Tasteless, Tactless Time for "Virtue-Signalling" (When Your Actions Are Much Like the GOP's)
- Violence by cops isn't a "leftist" thing
- United Arab Emirates: GNU/Linux at Over 8%
- According to statCounter
- As XBox Goes Out of Business Helen Chiang Adds Insult to Injury
- XBox sales are worst in 25 years
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXIV - Women as Hostages, Even Spouses
- First he put his own spouse behind bars by accusing the spouse of what he himself seems guilty of
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- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXIX - Crime Numbers Regarding GGG (Americans) and Why Those Still Matter
- Time does not undo the actions
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXVIII - Telling the Police About the Defamatory Blog Where Posts Targeted My Wife and I (From Across the Atlantic Ocean)
- Two years ago we spoke to cops a lot
- The Register MS is Losing Money Again, Based on The Register MS
- Selling out didn't pay off for very long
- There Are No "Layoffs" Anymore, Layoffs Got Rebranded
- We're entering bizarre times when layoffs are said to be "down" (according to the regime that suffered a 'bloodbath' in the election) because companies quit using the term "layoffs"
- Gemini Links 05/11/2026: Rivers of London, Soul Cakes, STMicroelectronics, and Slop
- Links for the day
- The Register MS Has Just Published Fake Article With "AI" 84 Times in the Page Because It Was Paid to Do This!
- Astounding number of mentions of "AI" (84 in total)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 04, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, November 04, 2026
- Gemini Links 04/11/2026: Abacus and Spare IT Equipment
- Links for the day
- Viet Nam and Thailand at High Adoption Levels of GNU/Linux, Other Nations Nearby Are No Exception
- Helen Chiang and her colleagues say it's a "clown show" at Microsoft
- Richard Stallman on What It's Like to be Threatened by Strangers With Software Patents
- We hope that some EPO insiders will take time to listen to this talk
- Stealth Layoffs at IBM (PIPs and Bailouts)
- string of reports or unverified hearsay
- Steven Vaughan-Nichols is Slop
- Just look at this
- The Register MS is "Hosting a Dinner" for Sponsors
- Remember that The Register MS keeps publishing spam about "AI"
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXVI - A Potent Microsoft Threat to Administration of Justice Globally (Not Just Fair Elections)
- Breaking into machines to cover up one's own crimes
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXV - When One Does Not Understand Security (Nor Ever Pursues Security)
- One might therefore conclude that Garrett is a proponent of American back doors
- Links 04/11/2026: "Democratic Establishment" Wins Big and "Pentagon Sued Over Hegseth’s New “Future of Warfare” Committee Led by Musk"
- Links for the day
- A Geminispace Tally
- That's not the Web, it is an alternative to it
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXIII - Shooting the Messenger is a Presidential Tactic
- why our ministers are looking for ways to fix the law.
- Andy's Latest Writings About Proton CEO Andy Yen, "JavaScript Required", and Slavery in Technology
- Andy (of The Cyber Show) has some new material
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXII - Malfunctions Reported in Windows Voting Machines (as Usual)
- "There are always problems," Ryan told us
- Gemini Links 04/11/2026: GoAccess, Adopting Gopher, and Twisty Passages
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 03, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, November 03, 2026
- "The Judge Accepted That Mrs Schestowitz Had Been the Subject of a Vicious Campaign of Online Harassment"
- That's consistent with how they men treat women
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXI - Microsoft and Promoters of "Secure Boot" Are to Blame
- the important thing is that the dictator and Microsoft can remotely control all computers
- Links 03/11/2026: Science Around "Near-Death Experiences" and "Do Animals Grieve?"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 03/11/2026: Guitar, 3D-Printable Electric Spinning Wheel, Against Haven Social, and More
- Links for the day
- Intel Corporation Down Over 51% in One Month, the US Bailout Didn't Work
- Is the slop industry [sic] next?
- Microsoft European Development Centre (EDC) Next to be Culled?
- No time for that anymore
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXX - Breaking This Year’s Election Process With Bug Doors in Restricted Boot
- Thankfully here in the UK we typically still vote with paper and pencil
- Mass Layoffs at SUSE, Over 10% of Staff Gone
- Ignore their excuses
- When You're a Software Developer and They Tell You That Your Occupation is Dead or Dying in Order to Sell Dysfunctional Offerings Based on Hype (and Plagiarism)
- Disbelief is a strength when companies borrow trillions of dollars to sell a dud and construct a pyramid scheme
- Links 03/11/2026: Slop-Tied Debt is Becoming a Crisis (Lenders Panic), "Ukrainian Journalists Urge Global Media Not to Look Away From Russian Aggression"
- Links for the day
- Malaysia Seems to be Exploring Digital Independence With GNU/Linux and More
- not too bad
- Microsoft Windows is Crashing in Republic of South Korea
- Like in Japan, they seem to be shutting the lid on decades of Microsoft-isms
- Think Less, Aim for Less (When It Comes to Hardware)
- An abundance of hardware being wasted on a pyramid scheme will become a cautionary tale one day
- Gemini Links 03/11/2026: Stargazing, Linux-Powered Prism "Ambient Computer", and Abandoning Streaming Disservices
- Links for the day
- GNU/Linux Made Big Strides in Portugal This Year
- Microsoft had many layoffs in Portugal in recent years
- GNU/Linux in Argentina Now Measured at 8% "Market Share"
- Argentina is known for exporting skilled footballers, not advanced technology, but it has a large population, which we can hope will dump Windows
- Microsoft is Borrowing Loads of Money While Telling 60,000 Workers to Take the "Offer" and Leave, Microsoft Wants Bailouts From the Dictator
- Vote in elections and also vote with your wallet
- Microsoft and Spoilt Food
- Some whistleblowers may be needed here
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXIX - Undermining US Election While Engaging in Lawfare in England (BBC) Against Publishers That Cover Anti-Election Violence
- The elephant in the room is back doors in voting machines
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 02, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, November 02, 2026